State and sovereignty
Though they contrasted in their social vision, More and Elyot both
rested their ‘state of the common [or public] weal’ on a traditional order
which the politics of the Reformation would render obsolete. Both men
put their hopes of reform (in a general sense) in the benevolence of the
monarchy of Henry VIII, described by Lord Chancellor More at the
opening of the parliament of 1529–36 as the good shepherd who had
expelled from his flock the scabby ‘great wether’ (the fallen chancellor,
Cardinal Wolsey) and summoned ‘his high court of parliament’ to
reform laws made ‘very insufficient’ by ‘long continuance of time and
mutation of things’. But what ‘the Reformation parliament’ was in fact
used by Henry VIII to achieve was his divorce from Catherine of
Aragon, and in the process the destruction of papal jurisdiction over the
English clergy and the annexation to his crown of the dignity of ‘only
supreme head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana
Ecclesia’. The dominance of parliamentary statute as the supreme source
of law for the commonwealth was brutally confirmed by such acts as
that of 1533 which forbade appeals to Rome in spiritual no less than
temporal matters, a measure justified by the assertion that the realm of
England was an empire ‘governed by one supreme head and king having
the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto
whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided
in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and
owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience’.^24
The statutes of the Reformation parliament confirmed a practical
dominance of the law made by the king in parliament which had long
been emerging, though rulers and their chancellors (Richard of
Gloucester in 1483, Cardinal Morton in 1495) might still derive ‘politic
rule’ and the customs and liberties of Englishmen from a grand
assembly of ‘the Laws of God and of God’s Church, and also the laws
of Nature and of England’, with the Mosaic Law, the Law of Nations
and of Equity thrown in.^25 In his influential Dialogue betwixt a Doctor
of Divinity and a Student in the Laws of England: of the Grounds of the
Said Laws, and of Conscience, published (originally in Latin) in 1523,
and in a second dialogue of 1531, Christopher St. German translated
the law of nature into a fundamental law of reason and conscience,
which he found comprehensively embodied in the customs and statutes
of England and in the judgments of the English judges who welded them
306 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^24) Edward Hall, The Triumphant Reign of King Henry the VIII(London, 1550; repr.
1904), ii. 164–5; Elyot, The Governor, 95–102; SRiii. 427–9, 492.
(^25) RPvi. 240, 458; Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas, 196 ff.